Abstract

This letter reports a study designed to measure the benefits of voicing in the recognition of concurrent syllables. The target and distracter syllables were either voiced or whispered, producing four combinations of vocal contrast. Results show that listeners use voicing whenever it is present either to detect a target syllable or to reject a distracter. When the predictable effects of audibility were taken into account, limited evidence remained for the harmonic cancellation mechanism thought to make rejecting distracter syllables more effective than enhancing target syllables.

Received 14 September 2009Accepted 05 October 2009Published online 14 December 2009

Acknowledgments:

The research was supported by the United Kingdom Medical Research Council under Grant Nos. G0500221 and G9900369. We would like to thank James Tanner and Sami Abu-Wardeh for help with collecting the data, and Nick Fyson for assistance in producing the programs that ran the experiments.